


parlez vous (or something like that?)

by backflipsaway



Series: the arms of the ocean are carrying me [1]
Category: Brooklyn Nine-Nine (TV)
Genre: Alcohol, Early season 3, Established Relationship, F/M, Second Date, originally a 5+1 things but its too loose to differentiate, sort of, using this to cope in between seasons
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-17
Updated: 2016-06-17
Packaged: 2018-07-15 13:12:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,308
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7223638
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/backflipsaway/pseuds/backflipsaway
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the hurricane that was their first date, Jake and Amy embark on what they hope to be a less sexually explosive second date. Unintentionally, Jake keeps surprising Amy in the most funny, confusing, beautiful ways possible.</p>
            </blockquote>





	parlez vous (or something like that?)

**Author's Note:**

> They take their minds off of the stress of Holt and Gina leaving the Nine-Nine. And I take my mind off studying for exams by writing this although my head was never studying for exams to begin with (I know, but I you're reading this now because of me.)
> 
> Title taken from the lovely song, [Le Velo Pour Deux by The Brobecks.](https://youtu.be/oKiv0cy-Iyw) Listened to a lot of them while I wrote this. If you like Panic! At The Disco, you should check them out! (The amazing lead singer, Dallon Weekes is the current bassist of Panic!) Also, listen to [this](https://youtu.be/HD0iZilkDFQ) older demo of the song too. It's so good.

Amy looks at herself in the mirror a final time, adjusting her dress. It’s been five minutes past the time Jake said he’d pick her up at her apartment, but him being a little late was not unexpected.

She takes a last glance as she hears a knock on her front door and walks over to open the door to greet her date. She doesn’t need to look through the peephole because she already knows it’s Jake awaiting her on the other side of the door. She smiles at her phone resting on the side table, vibrating and flashing on from the incoming spam of texts from Jake proclaiming that he’s here and that she “should come to the door quickly before he dies of boredom” and other variants declaring his immensely low capacity for boredom.

“Hey Ames!” Jake beams at Amy as she opens the door for him. “You look nice.” He looks her up and down for a second and smiles brighter. “Let’s go!”

Amy greets Jake back happily as she locks the door behind her. She does a mental checklist of all the essentials she needs in her purse and reassures herself that she remembered everything. By the time she’s properly crossed off everything, they’re already out the front doors of her building.

“So Jake,” Amy begins. “How exactly are we getting to this date you’ve planned for us this fine evening?”

Jake scrunches his face up but twists it into a smirk. “Glad you asked,” he begins as the two walk up to the bus stop in front of the corner store near Amy’s building. “Public transit!” He pulls out a bus card as a bus pulls up to the stop. 

A few disinterested commuters shuffle on and off the bus and Jake and Amy board. Amy reaches for her purse but Jake pushes her hand away. “Don’t worry babe, I got this.” He holds his scuffed up bus card with pride. The two take seats near the back of the bus.

“Babe?” Amy is taken aback, but amused.

“You don’t like that lovey-dovey pet name? Not that I pegged you down for being an annoying romantic type,”

“Nah, it’s cool. This is _cool_.” 

“Whatever you say, babe.” Jake creeps his hand into hers.

“It’s just our second date, Jake.” Amy looks down, but holds his hand warmly.

“We’ve already had sex,” Jake replies as Amy awkwardly glances around wondering if anyone overheard or cared.

“Come on man,” Amy drones bothered, “I can guarantee it won’t be happening again if you keep being a pain in the ass.”

“Title of your— “

“Stop.”

“Our—? “ 

“Worse.”

“Sorry. It’s a bad habit.”

“You’re damn right it’s a bad habit. How I’m attracted to you is an enigma, Jake.”

“Don’t you mean to call me _babe_ , babe?”

“Whatever then, _babe_.” Amy accentuates her voice with sarcasm.

“You called me babe! I’m totally swooning right now!” Jake beams.

“Me too! It’s our second date, Jake, and you picked me up on an old, smelly bus. This is a total swoon-fest.” Amy imitates Jake’s joking tone mockingly as she places her other hand on top of their interlocking hands, turning her body close to Jake’s as a sign of the romance.

“First of all, you’re really hitting me with some low blows with the hurtful vocabulary you’re bringing out. _'Old?'_ _'Smelly?'_ Ouch.” Jake clutches his chest dramatically. “Second of all, I’m on a budget! I don’t have a car anymore either, so I’m taking your advice and being practical with my money.”

“Don’t look so defeated.” Amy awkwardly pats her date on the shoulder with her free hand. “I’m having a lot of fun so far anyway. Glad you’re taking my financial advice to heart too.”

  


* * *

  


The bus stops, and Jake tugs at Amy, telling her that this is their stop. They both step off the bus and walk hand in hand. They start walking down the street as the bus drives away and an older, affluent-looking couple strolls a few paces ahead of them.

Loudly, the rich couple in front of them converses.

“Darling, Barcelona was simply lovely,” a woman in a grand fur coat avows with an arm clutching in between her lover’s chest and upper arm.

“Honey, I know, the country’s charm impacted me in the most heavenly way,” the lover replies, “I miss the food, the romantic dinner by candlelight with you dearest, and the seafood was simply divine…”

Jake cuts into the noise from the loud conversation and looks at Amy with inspired eyes. “We should totally do that one day, Ames.”

Amy does her best to tune out the mouthy socialites. “Us, take a trip to Europe?”

“Yeah, totally!” Jake reaches out his free arm wide, as if the whole world was at his fingertips. 

“We’d need to save up _forever _for a trip that fancy.”__

“C’mon Ames, we don’t have to do it the same exact fancy way that couple did. We can save costs.”

“Achieving that many savings would need careful, intricate planning.” Amy hums, dancing around rough drafts of plans in her head. “Sounds like that could use a binder,” she elates. 

“See? This could be fun! We could like, drive there. Take a huge road trip to save money.”

Amy shakes her head. “What?”

“Well, flying can be very expensive, so driving there could cut us some costs.” 

Amy blinks repeatedly. “That won’t work.”

Jake stares back at her. “Huh?”

Amy tries formulating a response to explain the impossibility of driving to continental Europe from New York that doesn’t sound condescending. She looks up as they’re walking and remembers something.

“Jake, didn’t you say that this was the restaurant we were eating at?”

“Yeah, but that couple had me craving seafood, and there’s this cozy little seafood restaurant I heard was good from Charles that I’ve been meaning to try. It’s actually just down the block.”

Amy smiles. “That sounds good.”

She makes a mental note to show Jake the huge world map in her apartment after dinner, and to go over it with him in excruciating detail.

She also wonders whether or not a restaurant with Charles’ seal of approval could be trusted given his track record of weird taste in cuisine. 

“Don’t worry, Ames, Gina’s been there before too. She said it’s actually pretty good.”

Amy puts a little pep into her step, and the two’s interlocking hands swing along happily. Jake knew exactly what she was worrying about.

  


* * *

  


After ten minutes of waiting, and occupying two out of three of the chairs in the cramped waiting area of the restaurant, Jake and Amy are led to their seats. They pass by a grandma glaring at them, sitting in the third of the three chairs, who wasn’t let in due to her party of three.

The couple is directed past a narrow, wooden-paneled hallway to an open room with low ceilings. It’s dimly lit by low-hanging glass lights, and the tables are of rustic wood. Seemingly, they were legitimately worn unlike some of the numerous new-wave hipster restaurants in popping up everywhere in Brooklyn.

They sit and are waited on by a cheerful elderly waitress. They both order modest meals and a bottle of wine in accompaniment and make an agreement to split the bill. 

Later, after a few minutes of small talk they’re served and they clink glasses of the cheapest white wine the restaurant had. 

“We’re on a budget, and I can’t taste the difference anyway!” Jake proclaims, lifting his glass up in a toast.

Amy raises her glass as well. “And I drink to that.” 

They both sip.

Jake takes Amy’s crackers and tries shooting them into her chowder. He crumbles them and complains about the crumbs getting into his shirt sleeves.

“Keepin’ it classy!” Amy sneers as she repositions her wine glass further away from becoming mushy cracker soup and collateral damage.

“What was that, Ms. Santiago? Doth thou insult me?”

“No, you’re the classiest person I know!” Amy reassures him in between laughs.

“Don’t lie!” Jake readjusts his narrow black tie and smooths out his pink plaid shirt.

“I’m serious, Jake! You sure know how to wine and dine. This place oozes class.” Amy takes her elbows off the table.

Jake looks to the table adjacent to them, with the middle aged man slurping his soup noisily. 

“Past soup guy over there then,” Amy interjects.

“You’re right, Ames. Can’t let little things like this get us down, right? This date’s been great!” Jake gleams while he rolls his sleeves up again. “Because the world is our lobster!”

Amy double takes Jake. “What?”

“You know, the saying,” Jake replies, taking mouthfuls of his clams.

“That’s not how the saying goes, Jake. It goes: the world is your _oyster_.”

“Really? I swear oysters go with a different saying. Like, _oysters_ are the ones who mate for life.”

“That’s lobsters!” Amy retaliates.

“See? Told you.” Jake chuckles.

“What? No!”

“I know my stuff, Amy. All that literary stuff. I passed high school English! Can’t get much classier than that,” Jake oozes in pride.

Amy sighs. “The world is your oyster, Jake.”

“Woah, babe. It’s a little soon to say things like that, but I like you a lot too,” Jake laughs nervously in reply.

“Never said we were the oysters, Jake. The _world_ is your oyster. But lobsters are the ones who mate for life.”

Jake exhaled in relief. “So we’re lobsters, then?”

Amy spills her wine on her dress.

  


* * *

  


After spilling half a glass of supposedly subpar wine on herself and frantically heading to the tiny restroom to use paper towels to try and clean up the stain, Amy resolves that she doesn’t want wine anymore. Which left Jake, who happens to hate wasting perfectly good alcohol, with the rest of the wine bottle. She tells him that he doesn’t have to finish the rest of it, but he insists.

“You’ve gotta get the bang out of your buck, Ames,” Jake slurs in between glugs of wine. “This is fine,“ he insists as he downs a third glass. “Oysters are delicious!”

“Jake, you ordered the clams.”

Topping off his final glass, Jake’s hand is shaky. With excitement in his voice he announces that he’s finished the finest bottle of wine the restaurant had (a lie, but once again, he couldn’t tell the difference) to the rest of the patrons’ complete indifference. 

In response, Amy hastily asks for the bill. She swats away Jake’s hand as he tries reaching for the check. His eyes look a little glassy and he doesn’t seem nearly lucid enough to be capable of properly paying. She doesn’t think his bank account can handle much chipping away at either. They both thank their server as they get up to leave, Jake much louder and breathier than she.

Outside, Amy hails a cab with one hand, the other preoccupied holding her date’s as she leads him around. Once inside the taxi, the smell of booze from her partner just gets stacked upon, trapped inside the cab’s confines. She tells the taxicab driver to bring them to her address.

Slumping in the chair, Jake mumbles to Amy almost incoherently. “ _No es Bueno_ ,” he grumbles as he adjusts his belt with a heavy accent.

Amy snickers at his broken Spanish. She’d never heard him try speaking Spanish in her whole life. She wonders if he’s saying he’s not feeling good, or if the smell’s not good. She wonders _what exactly_ is _no bueno_. 

“ _Usted es bella_ ,” he mutters. Amy doesn’t know whether his sudden Spanish was caused by the cab driver having a technically illegal cell phone conversation in Spanish, or because he was just trying to appeal to her, but the entire encounter amuses her either way.

Almost incapacitated, Jake half-snoozes on the rest of the ride there, only interrupting his own silence by muttering flawed and slurred sentence fragments _en Español_ , with random interjections of English.

“You’re so damn lucky we’re both off work tomorrow,” Amy whispers in his ear, not entirely sure he’s conscious to listen. “Though I’d loved to have seen you try getting work done after being _that_ hammered.”

Jake grunts and Amy can’t completely tell if it was a response to her teasing or just a result of the alcohol consumption.

  


* * *

  


Gracefully after entering her apartment, Amy guides Jake to the sofa with the massive world map hanging above it. Jake’s still a little woozy from the entire wine bottle he drank. Unfortunately, this means that it’s particularly hard for Amy to explain geography and the existence of the Atlantic Ocean to Jake.

“Ames, I’m telling you, I drove upstate a few times before. Driving to Barcelona shouldn’t be that hard,” Jake bellows breathily.

Amy points to the Atlantic Ocean, and the vast distance of water in between New York and Spain.

“Huh. That’s pretty far,” he drawls in a low-functioning epiphany.

Amy emphasizes the fact that the Atlantic Ocean is an ocean. The second largest in the world, as a matter of fact.

“Jeez, Ames, you can’t drive over water,” he murmurs as he clears his throat. “I get it! My insultingly poor geography skills are just the remnants of that _vin blanc _talking.”__

Amy laughs at her date’s butchering of yet another foreign language. “But you started insisting that driving to Europe was possible while you were sober.”

“Uh, the clutches of alcohol work in mysterious ways, babe. The world’s a big place, and I never really payed attention to that before.” Jake admits.

“You’re right,” Amy agrees, “but I swear it’s just the huge map that’s getting you all in awe.”

“The map’s really cool though, and I’m not just teasing you.”

Amy smiles.

“Can you show me where you were born? Like where your family’s from? I want you to tell me about there and stuff.”

She points to a small island wedged in the water between North and South America. “My mom’s side is from a village in Cuba,” She moves her finger to the middle of a long, narrow strip of land at the far west coast of South America. “And my dad’s side is from Chile. Which you will be enthused to know is a country with it’s capital city named Santiago.” 

He stifles a giggle upon sight of the name of Chile’s capital. He jokes that it’s fitting.

She tells him of some of the fond memories she had when she visited family there when she was younger. Then, she rummages through photo albums trying to find some pictures of the places she told him so fondly about, and he intently (as far as a drunk person could) listened, following along with her happily.

“Your parents’ home countries were so far apart, and yet they were able to find each other,” Jake began with an album sitting snugly on both his lap and hers. He turned the page and looked at a worn photo that was faded at the edges.

“Yeah,” Amy replies as she reminisces with the folder in hand.

“That’s beautiful.”

She nods.

“Ames, forget Barcelona. Which we can’t even drive to, which is by the way, totally lame.” He hiccups. “I wanna visit Cuba and Chile. With you. You seem so happy and proud talking about the roots of your culture. I wanna visit your family, I wanna see these countries, and I wanna see them with you.”

It’s funny for Amy to see drunk Jake come to these conclusions, the last time he was hammered was simultaneous with her own drunkenness, and mostly erased from her memory. But what he said was so unbearably adorable.

“One day.” Amy ruffles his hair.

“And we could take an epic road trip,” Jake mumbles as he drifts off to sleep on her shoulder. 

Amy seriously wonders if Jake understood that Cuba was an island, and therefore quite hard to drive to. Or if he understood the abstract concept of the Atlantic Ocean in his intoxication at all. She shudders at the thought of planning a drive all the way to Chile too.

Nonetheless, she then snaps out of her inner thoughts and back to the real world because Jake’s weight is starting to get to her, and she really wants to put away her photo albums. But she also appreciates the marvel that her long-time police partner, Jake Peralta is asleep on her shoulder. And now, she supposes after not really thinking about it much before, that he’s also her new boyfriend.

She lingers a little longer and appreciates how Jake soft Jake is and how his pink plaid meshes so well into the colour scheme of her living room.

“Jake, I swear, you must be my oyster or something,” Amy whispers to herself as Jake sleeps soundly on her shoulder lying on the couch, painstakingly making the purposeful misquotation.

Subconsciously or whatever, Jake must have heard her, she thinks as she watches him smile, ever so slightly.

Amy lies him down on the couch and debates waking him up to go to bed with her, but she decides against it. She never really got to cherish his sleeping face before, especially after _that_ first date. She decides there’s not enough room on the couch for the both of them, (there’s hardly enough room for just him.) So she plants him a kiss on the forehead, tucks a blanket over him, and walks to bed, only finishing half of her bedtime hygiene routine, sloppily at that before plopping down on her bed to sleep. 

She wakes up the next morning to a warm Jake, in the t-shirt he wore underneath the plaid shirt he wore the day before, and baggy boxers, with his arms wrapped around her waist. 

She lulls back to sleep and awakes to a cold, empty patch of bed where the lack of Jake cuddling her from behind occupied until half an hour before.

The fitting pink plaid, skinny black tie, and black jeans Jake wore the day before lay askew on her bedroom floor. This time the clothes lay there without being clawed off in a sexual tension fueled frenzy. After dragging her feet to her kitchen, she sees a still-scruffy Jake sitting cross-legged on a dining chair eating cereal.

Swallowing his cereal, he greets her, “Morning babe, I was gonna prepare you breakfast in bed, but your kitchen arsenal is completely lacking. You don’t even have eggs. I was gonna pour you a bowl, but I didn’t want it to get soggy.”

She sits across from him and prepares herself a bowl.

In between bites Jake giggles. “Ames, we got through a date, our second date at that, without it ending in passionate, heated, steamy sex!” Jake shovels a final large spoonful of cereal into his mouth and starts slurping down the remaining milk in his bowl. He brings his face close to Amy’s with a wide, milk-moustachioed grin. “But if you want, we can get on that now.”

Amy scoffs and uses the handle of her spoon to push Jake’s forehead away. “No. But that moustache you’re sporting is especially tempting though.” She traces her the patch of face between her upper lip and the bottom of her nose.

He jumps up thrilled in response, hand grabbing at where his moustache was supposed to be. “I SUDDENLY BECAME PHYSICALLY CAPABLE OF FACIAL HAIR?”

As he runs to the bathroom to awe at his new facial hair Amy stirs her spoon in her cereal in anticipation for his return. He bursts back into the kitchen pouting, sans-milk-moustache.

Amy grabs Jake’s chin above the table and tilts it down so it’s within her reach. She kisses him softly on the lips. “You look fine.”

He sighs. “She still likes me!”

She chuckles, pointing to herself with her thumb. “She sure does.”

She kisses him again.

**Author's Note:**

> I got the idea for Jake picking Amy up on public transit for a date while having a convo w my friend. s/o to u loser
> 
> One day after copious amounts of research, I'll hopefully write a sequel with them taking a trip to South/Central America. Amy hasn't been in so long due to working so hard!
> 
> Tell me if I'm writing Jake and Amy in character/funny enough because I'm out here truly trying. I came up with the lobster thing because I recently finished watching _Friends_ for the first time. But I mixed it in with the oyster thing because I'm a genius and love shellfish. So the world is your lobster!
> 
> The only thing Jake remembers about Spanish is that _usted_ is the formal form of _you_. Alas, there's no such thing as half-a-drink Amy. Also, Hot Rod reference (which we watched in English class for some reason.)
> 
>  
> 
> _Follow my[tumblr](https://backflipsaway.tumblr.com) and yell with me about Brooklyn Nine-Nine!_


End file.
